Our system allows the user to design a continuous flow animation starting from a fluid picture by semi-automatically applying the fluid motion extracted from the video example. The upper example animates a campfire in our artist's painting using a fire video. The botom example animates a water surface in Johannes Vermeer's painting using an ocean video.
[Abstract]
We propose a system that allows the user to design a continuous flow animation starting from a still fluid image. The basic idea is to apply the fluid motion extracted from a video example to the target image. The system first decomposes the video example into three components, an average image, a flow field and residuals. The user then specifies equivalent information over the target image. The user manually paints the rough flow field, and the system automatically refines it using the estimated gradients of the target image. The user semi-automatically transfers the residuals onto the target image. The system then approximates the average image and synthesizes an animation on the target image by adding the transferred residuals and warping them according to the user-specified flow field. Finally, the system adjusts the appearance of the resulting animation by applying histogram matching. We designed animations of various pictures, such as rivers, waterfalls, fires, and smoke.
[Publication]
Makoto Okabe, Ken Anjyo, Takeo Igarashi, Hans-Peter Seidel,"Animating Pictures of Fluid using Video Examples", Computer Graphics Forum (EUROGRAPHICS 2009 Special Issue), vol.28. No.2, pp.677-686, March 30 - April.3 2009)
[Demo/Project Page]